“The Battle Of Evermore” by Led Zeppelin

"The Battle of Evermore" sits on Led Zeppelin's untitled fourth album, the 1971 record everybody calls Led Zeppelin IV, and it's the strangest thing on it: no electric thunder at all, just acoustic guitar and a mandolin chiming like something out of a candlelit hall. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant cooked it up at Headley Grange, Page grabbing John Paul Jones's mandolin, an instrument he'd never touched, and getting the whole song down in a single sitting.

Plant doesn't carry it alone. Folk singer Sandy Denny trades lines with him, their voices circling each other like two criers calling across a battlefield, while Tolkien's Lord of the Rings haunts the words, just as it does on "Misty Mountain Hop". Page produced, Andy Johns engineered, and on the record "Stairway to Heaven" comes next.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.